Drop Kitchen
Free, iPad
These two apps promise to get you cooking fancy dishes with minimal hassle. Drop Kitchen is for bakers: it’s free but you’ll also need the company’s set of scales, which costs £80 and links to an iPad running the app via Bluetooth. With the scales linked, choose a recipe from the hundreds on the app and you’ll get step-by-step instructions, with the scales measuring ingredients as you go. The recipes are easy to follow and there are photos to help. There’s quite an American slant, though, so it helps if you like pancakes and cornbread. The clever part comes if you’re short on a key ingredient: weigh the amount of sugar, say, that you do have and the app adjusts all other measurements on the fly. Likewise, you can scale up. Timers beep to tell you to adjust the oven and you can move to the next step in the recipe by tapping the (washable) scales rather than by dabbing floury fingers on the screen. You can also use the scales without following a recipe, resetting to zero as you go, so you can keep adding ingredients to a single bowl.
Gousto
Free, iPhone
Gousto lets you organise a week’s worth of meals and then order the ingredients, with the exception of oils and condiments, for home delivery. The menu, created by the company’s chefs from seasonal produce, consists of 10 main courses and changes every week; tap the dishes you want, for two or four people, and a few days later all the ingredients arrive in a cool box, down to the last individually wrapped carrot. Also included are well-written and illustrated instructions that you can store in a binder, to create your own cookbook. The food is restaurant standard but requires no more than average kitchen skills to rustle up. The meals typically take less than an hour to prepare and cook and — full disclosure — taste delicious. The price of convenience is pretty high, though: you need to take out a weekly subscription, ranging from two recipes for two people at £30 to four for four people at £58, although you can skip entire weeks without fuss. Delivery is nationwide, bar a few islands and outposts.